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Frederick Philip Grove fonds

Frederick Philip Grove arrived in Manitoba in September 1912. Although he kept his prior life very much a secret, he was born in 1879 as Felix Paul Greve in Radomno, a small Prussian town on the German-Polish border. In late July 1909 he faked his suicide and immigrated to North America. In Canada, he was a teacher/principal in a variety of rural schools, including Rapid City where he lived for seven years before moving to Ottawa in 1929. There, he joined Graphic Publishers until 1931, when he settled on an estate in Simcoe, Ontario. Grove wrote and his wife Catherine Wiens opened a Froebel Kindergarten. Grove suffered a crippling stroke in 1944 and although he continued to write, his health deteriorated. He died on August 19, 1948. During his Manitoba years between 1919 and 1929, Grove published twelve books, including Over Prairie Trails (1922), The Turn of the Year (1923), Settlers of the Marsh (1925), A Search for America (1927), Our Daily Bread (1928) and It Needs to be Said (1929). He also wrote many short stories, reviews, essays and articles, and a very large number of poems. In Ontario, several more books were published, starting with The Yoke of Life (1930). Fruits of the Earth (1933), Master of the Mill (1944), and his official autobiography In Search of Myself (1946) followed. His "ant-book", the Swiftian satire Consider Her Ways (1947), was published as a fragment. The digitized material from the Frederick Philip Grove fonds includes correspondence with I. Warkentin describing life in Canada in 1913, manuscripts written by Grove describing the experiences of immigrants, documents relating to Grove's Canadian 1921 citizenship, and photographs depicting Grove's home in Ashfield, MB.